January has never felt like a new year for me. I’ve always rooted the new year around September. Part of that is that school starts and that feels like a line where the calendar flips. Part of it is the Jewish New Year, tied to the notion of a harvest*.
*I have very literally never harvested anything in my entire life, unless we’re talking about harvesting feelings of vengeance - in which case, look out 7th grade English teacher Ms. Prisampt
But still: September always sneaks up on me.
The air shifts, the leaves change, the days shorten, and - sometimes gently, sometimes like a punch in the gut - every year around this time I’m reminded that my mother died 6 years ago. There’s a part of me that still thinks she’s alive and kicking because we thought she was going to outlive us all, even though she lived her almost 75 years pretty hard. There’s a part that still expects to pick up the phone and hear some sort of complaint about something. And there’s another part that has grown used to the quiet, that has made some kind of uneasy peace with the absence, despite leaving so many things unsettled.
Grief is strange like that. It isn’t a clean, five-step process or a tidy arc* with a clear beginning and end. It’s like a weather system that rolls in uninvited, at unexpected times, long after the world assumes you’ve moved on. And for me, the hardest thing about grief hasn’t been its intensity, but its slipperiness. I keep wanting to understand it but it refuses to stay still. I want it to be linear, but it wants to throw me curveballs. And I want it to be over, but it really never ends. You simply can’t think your way through it, which feels like the hardest and the most important lesson.
*My therapist says this to me ALL the time. When he and I first started, I kept saying things like “when does denial end because I’m ready to be angry.” He was like “I’ve got good news and bad news …”
What I wanted to write about today is how we navigate not just death, but all kinds of loss, and what it means to keep moving forward without “getting over it.”
I love the Kübler-Ross* stages of grief paradigm. It’s a guide to understand and grapple with what you’re feeling and helps contextualize. But the reality is that it’s a vast oversimplification of what you’re actually going through because it suggests a) you feel all of these things neatly in order and b) there’s a finish line to cross. It feels too neat.
*Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance if you are unfamiliar
And life is full of unexpected triggers. You hear a song* or a smell a familiar scent or you’re walking down the street and a random thought pops into your head and you reach for your phone to share it. Those experiences can reset the clock and bring back the emotions full-force. And different emotions can compete for your headspace. You can feel sadness and gratitude, anger and peace, and you can feel them all at the same time. There’s no guidebook.
*This one is the most triggering for me, specifically the song “I Can Dream About You” by Dan Hartman
This messiness is exactly why we have to feel our way through it, not try to intellectualize it away.
And that can be difficult, for me especially. Because I’m a problem-solver. I’m a planner. I want to “make sense” of everything. It took me a while to recognize that some things can’t be solved or fixed; they can only be lived. I think we all have these moments where we try to reason or logic our way out of feelings of loss. For me, I just dove into work. I stayed late and I started early and I worked out like crazy. Then I found myself with a quiet moment in the shower one day where the voices in my head and all the feelings of loss I’d been setting aside caught up to me and I broke down. There’s no amount of distraction that’s enough to outrun the feeling of loss.
My biggest problem in dealing was always that I felt like healing had to mean moving on. Forgetting. That’s why I had to keep running, because if my grief caught up to me and I processed it, that would mean my feelings were gone. And my mother was already gone. It felt impossible to face losing both.
With the help of my support structure, I realized that logic-ing my way through meant denying that emotion plays a role. Feeling my way through meant allowing myself to be sad without a deadline.
And to be clear, loss isn’t limited to death. We can feel a sense of loss for all kinds of things. We tend to be inclined to minimize these types of losses because they seem small or insignificant or we’ve been conditioned to just “be a man” or “deal with it”. That doesn’t mean we don’t mourn things like friendships that faded, jobs that ended, identities we’ve shed, life changes that bring uncertainty. Very recently, I’ve found myself mourning a friendship that I once held dear but that simply faded over time. These things happen sometimes for no other reason than the thing ran its course: it served its purpose for a time and then went away. There’s no judgment there, but there’s still a finality to that, a sense of loss. Grief is not just for death; it’s the process of adjusting to life not being the way you imagined.
Feeling your way through these smaller losses builds emotional muscle for the big ones.
The loss doesn’t shrink, but you grow around it. It’s the “grief as a ball in a box” metaphor. The box has a button that triggers pain and the ball is large, so it’s constantly hitting the button. But over time, the ball shrinks. It still hits the button, but less frequently. Eventually, the button gets hit sparsely, but the pain is still real. The ball may shrink, but it never goes away.
By this point, as usual, you’re asking the logical question: what if anything can we do?
As always, YMMV, but I have a few practical suggestions. First, recognize that your emotions aren't right or wrong. They’re natural and part of you, so let them arrive without judgment. Also for me, finding safe containers for grief like journaling, therapy, or time with your support structure is extremely helpful. And I find it also helps to create some rituals like anniversary dates or telling stories to give shape to the pain.
When you feel your way through loss, you give yourself permission to be fully human. To be unsteady. To be imperfect. To let the ground fall out from under you, trusting that you’ll eventually find a new footing. And in doing so, you make space for something surprising: connection. You start to recognize grief in other people’s eyes. You learn to sit with them in their pain without rushing to fix it.
Loss will never feel fair. It will never feel neat. But when you stop trying to outthink it and start allowing yourself to feel it, something shifts. The loss doesn’t get smaller, but you get larger.
I don’t have much of a clever ending here today, but part of the inspiration for this today was the passing of my Uncle Al. My aunt Jackie (my mom’s sister) is a regular reader and a staunch supporter of everything that I do. So let it be known that loss is difficult, things can be challenging, but there’s always light in the support of friends and family. Zikrono L’vracha - May his memory be a blessing.
That’s all for this week, friends. Until next time.
Geoff, your article today was personal to me, and believe it’s relatable to all in many ways.
Your intelligence, eloquence in writing and usually with a humorous spin makes it very interesting and informative to read. Today you made me think about my own losses through the years and know all of us have different ways of dealing with it. Thank you for today’s and all your insightful articles.
We love you❤️❤️
You had me at Ms. Prisampt....our lives are shockingly similar, old friend. Thank you for sharing, as always.